Messiaen – Canteyodjaya [1949]
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Messiaen – Canteyodjaya [1949]By Roberto Toscano
January 20th, 2008
Welcome back to Beyond Theory and to what already is column #5! Today we will be talking about Hindu Rhythms as applied by Oliver Messiaen (1908-1992) in his composition titled Canteyodjaya (Solo Piano) – as well as going over a few other compositional techniques employed in this study. This work amounts to what is essentially a short (ca. 12 minutes) piece on Hindu rhythms, which Messiaen finished composing while visiting Tanglewood, MA in August 1949 (and not 1948 – as most sources state). You will notice that Messiaen will use authentic names for each rhythm in the piece, meaning he… (Continue)
Polyphonic Writing for Keyboard: Part 1By Roberto Toscano
January 4th, 2008
Hello and welcome back to Beyond Theory. In this column I would like us to get away from THEORY altogether and look closer at texturing and things approximate to the realm of composition. Over the course of the last few years I have come to realize that most people do not truly appreciate how versatile the piano can be when writing for it. By versatility I do not mean styles of music at all, but actually how the piano can be utilized to play many different lines and textures at the same time – its polyphonic capabilities. For the purpose… (Continue)
The Octatonic Scale & Symphony of Psalms (Stravinsky)By Roberto Toscano
October 17th, 2007
I mentioned in the introduction to this column that it was my goal to talk about certain topics that rarely get mentioned on guitar related sites, or for that matter any site that is out there. This will be the first such column that I write for this site, which essentially deals with one or more works by a composer, and deals with an application of a topic that is not common to most guitar players or at least is an expansion on certain things guitar players might have heard about but never understood or saw applied. For this column… (Continue)
Minor Scale HarmonyBy Roberto Toscano
October 16th, 2007
In the last column we talked about harmonizing the Major Scale in 3rds so that we could find all diatonic chords for that scale from each of its degrees. In doing so we ended up harmonizing every degree of that scale until we had every possible diatonic tension stacked on all of the seven degrees of said scale. For this column the goal will be much the same. We will continue with the tertian harmonization and apply it to natural minor, melodic minor, and finally harmonic minor scales. What will happen is that we will then have seven different chord… (Continue)
Major Scale HarmonyBy Roberto Toscano
October 15th, 2007
For this first column, I feel its best that we start off with something simple. The purpose of this column is to show which chords can be derived from the Major Scale, how one would come to these said chords and what possible tensions can be applied to each chord while remaining diatonic to the “mother” scale. A few things to note: All examples can be transposed into any other key, though for the majority of this column I will be using C major as our primary scale, this will make the given information easier to digest. The harmonization applied… (Continue)
